


The Lotus-Eaters

by maelidify



Series: Earth Intervals [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Emori has a lot of thoughts about storms, F/M, mid-season four, science island fic, the M rating is just to be super safe, there is one (1) sex joke so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 11:05:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17202338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: “I don’t like this place, John,” she said. “We’re not safe here.”





	The Lotus-Eaters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Debate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Debate/gifts).



> This fic was originally posted on tumblr as part of the Merry Memori gift exchange, organized by the lovely infernalandmortal (who also edited this).  
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> _“…Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to send a message back, much less return, their only wish to linger there…“_
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> - **The Odyssey, book 9**

* * *

It was at first an inking of something that scared her as they were leaving the cave— perhaps the way the fire died too quickly, a violent kind of suffocation. Emori wasn’t used to feeling attached to places. As John scooped up their few belongings, she noted the tension in his shoulders, the quick desperation in his motions.

“Think we’ll ever come back here?” she asked carefully. It wasn’t a question characteristic of her, and she could see that register in his half-surprised, caustic laugh.

“I don’t know what can survive what’s coming,” he said. Just a short time earlier, he’d described it as a storm. Emori often found that she liked storms— they gave good cover and allowed for more ambitious missions. She knew this storm would be different, but the word still summoned something instinctual in her.

And anyway, it wasn’t the cave she was talking about.

When they exited, she started running, squeezing his hand in hers. He squeezed back, his clumsy footsteps thumping besides hers on the earth, and she felt her breath fill her lungs like wind, like something powerful.

* * *

Once, when she was younger, Emori encountered a furiously starved hurricane. The kind that gripped trees by their roots, tearing them like hair from a scalp. When she and Otan ran, they didn’t know what their destination was. The chaos was everywhere.

Something about it felt like an unmasking. This was the world in its purest form— something that rips you apart without a second thought.

When she and Otan stopped running, they found themselves in an odd pocket, walled in by angry clouds. There was no rain here. All around them, the world shimmered angrily, rainless, windless in a small circle of space. Otan, still small then, had wanted to curl up and sleep in the peace, but Emori wanted to dive back in, rip apart the false calm. She didn’t trust it.

* * *

The first morning Emori woke up on ALIE’s island, there was a brightness coming from a high window, creeping in much like how she and John had crept away from the others the night before. They’d been bent on claiming a bed in Bekka Pramheda’s mansion before anyone else had the chance, and though they’d had to wait until she learned how to disable the drones, their mission had been successful. But she’d never slept on a bed before— the soft, yielding expanse at first felt like a mouth around her.

Waking up, though, it was John’s arm around her, lazy instead of hungry. His breathing was steady and she took a moment to study the shape of his lips, half parted in sleep, and the sharp cut of his cheekbones and nose. The shadows dancing in his features, even when he was unaware. Then she gently wriggled out of his grasp, careful not to wake him, and crossed to the window.

The sun was attacking the horizon, soft and slow but violent all the same. A quiet inhale. Emori had always respected it for its ceaseless rise and fall, but now, it broke in yellow and scarlet fractures across the clouds, forcing them awake. It should have looked peaceful. To Emori, it brought back the eye of the storm from so many years earlier, the tense stillness. The waiting.

Turning away, she noticed that John was awake, if barely so. There was still sleep in his eyes and his smile was faint and satisfied, making her feel warm in a slow, hazy kind of way.

“Not that I’m not enjoying the view,” he said, stretching like a cat, “but come back to bed.”

“What’s in it for me?” she teased.

“ _In_ is an interesting word choice,” he said, and she rolled her eyes as she climbed over the covers, pushing him lightly to make room.

“ _Gafen bis_.”

“Whatever that means, I’m sure I deserve it.”

“It means idiot,” she said, because that was close enough. He laughed and nuzzled her hand almost instinctively. And there it was, that wall of clouds, again— after freezing for a moment like a rabbit, she relaxed against him. He frowned in soft concern and she signed, leaning her forehead against his.

“I don’t like this place, John,” she said. “We’re not safe here.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly safe anywhere,” he said, a slight grumble. “At least this not-safe place has food and shelter.”

“For how long?” she asked. “Your people are here now. How long until they no longer have use for us?”  

He was silent, jaw working. She knew they wouldn’t survive what lived on this island, the other criminals, ruthless as she knew they could be. Ruthless as her. And that deathlike stillness. She needed to move, to fight something.

He was like that too, in his own way.

“Let’s explore this building today,” she suggested.

“You read my mind.”

“There’s bound to be something,” she said, meaning something they could claim and distribute. Something that would make them valuable. This place was a goldmine of potential tech, after all.

His answering grin was somehow sharp and warm at once; she felt she could nearly fall into it.

* * *

The house (John called it a mansion, which meant that Bekka Pramheda was affluent when she lived here) was protected by a security box and a system of wires running through it like veins; it was all Emori could do not to try to figure out how it worked then and there (“You could ask Reyes to show you,” John suggested, only slightly sour).

But there were other features to study. A system of computers in a personal office, an extensive plumbing system (including a room where you could wash off at the twist of a lever), a monitor where you could watch moving pictures.

When they found the kitchen, Emori immediately searched the cupboards, satisfied at the discovery of well-preserved dried food. John gravitated towards a bookshelf, lifting a heavy volume and flipping through it. He whistled.

“People did the weirdest shit with food before ALIE decided to kill everything,” he remarked, flipping through it intently. She smiled a little, noting the relaxed cast of his shoulders. He was genuinely interested in this.

“They still do, sometimes,” she said, peering over his shoulder, even though her reading skills were limited to tech markings. The food in the photographs was brilliantly colored and arranged uselessly. “If they can trade for the right ingredients.”

“Is that what you did? ‘Traded’ for ingredients?” he teased.

“A cooked rat is a cooked rat,” she said. “I have no skill as a  _randzi_.”

“I remember,” he said with a grin, and she shoved his shoulder lightly, marveling at the fact that they could joke about her time under the chip’s influence. But as soon as the lightness was noticed, it became heavy again— move, move, a voice in her head urged, reminding her that nothing was safe, nothing was still. They were walled in by the storm.

“I don’t know about skaikru,” she said carefully, the desperate edges of an idea coming together, fueled by the quiet panic, “but I’ve never met a clan that didn’t value a skilled cook.” As soon as she said it, it made perfect sense: John’s creative intuition, good in a pinch while on the run, might serve this role well.

A short laugh. “Me?” But his face shifted as he continued to flip through the book, the gears turning in his head in a way she recognized. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” she teased. “Pick something easy and make it for me.”

“Good thing I like my dates bossy,” he said.

* * *

While John cooked, Emori took apart one of the computers upstairs. Maybe there was something Raven Reyes could use in the whirls and edges of the machine. The work steadied her nervous heartbeat, the movement of it soothing to her hands. This work was second nature to her, a kind of rhythm; hold the tech with her left hand, take it apart with the more nimble fingers of her right.

Emori used to think the earth was a kind of machine where the roots were wires, where there was power in wind and a hard drive at the center of it all. It was a broken machine, but so was she, according to her people, and she functioned perfectly well for all that.

She lost track of the passing of time, but the sun was low and red in the sky when she heard a faint musical whine from downstairs. She had reached a stopping point in her work anyway and crept silently to the kitchen, watching John stir a pot with a long wooden spoon and tap the counter in time to the music with another, smaller utensil.

“What’s that?” she asked, and his eyes lit up just slightly when he saw her.

“Music,” he said.

“I know what music is, John,” she said, and he put the spoons down on the counter, tugging her towards him with both hands. The song was something dark, curious. Somehow angry and ecstatic all at once, something about light going out.

“You ever dance?” he asked, lifting her arm and pulling it around her body in such a way that she had to spin.

“I never did get invited to festivals,” she said, almost sardonically, but allowed herself a warm feeling, that smile that only he ever got to see. The music built and he spun her again, both of them moving clumsily, unfamiliar with this particular skill. She’d never had need of it.

Maybe it’s like hunting, she mused, or like stalking someone in the woods. Light steps, awareness of another heartbeat, some sort of intention. Their gaze careful and open, something preylike in them both. The music changed to something slower, more sinuous. His hands settled at her waist and as he pressed against her, their movements slowed down to a close, gentle sway.

This was a feeling something in her chest recognized; the fixed intent in his eyes. The fluorescence in the room lightened the sharp, tempremental blue, but she could still see the shadows moving in there. She wrapped her arms around his neck, stroking the back of his neck with her thumb as they danced.

“I think the food’s burning,” she said quietly after an endless moment of this.

“Sucks for the food,” he said, and kissed her.  

* * *

An hour later John tried cooking again, and she stayed in the kitchen with him this time, taking apart the different kitchen tools and putting them back together. There was a machine that spun small propellers, and a small chamber that could turn fruit into a puree, and a real stove. She’d only ever seen a few of those. There was also a fully stocked knife drawer, and she slipped two into her boot out of instinct.

“Here, try this,” he said, handing her a spoon of some sort of rice topped with a thick golden sauce. It was sweet and sticky with a hint of something that made her tongue burn.

“Where’s the rest?” she said and he grinned, scooping the rice into two bowls and drizzling the sauce over it.

“It’s a recipe for orange chicken,” he said. “But, uh. I’ve never actually seen a chicken, and I’m pretty sure there are none lurking on this island, so I had to make do.”

“It tastes like fire,” she said approvingly. “I knew you’d be good at this.”

“No offense, but you’ll eat anything.”

It was true; she was far from picky. As she finished her bowl of rice, she saw him thumb through the open book again, folding certain pages before moving on. She tried to hide her grin, the warmth curling around her insides, and unbidden…  

She knew suddenly why the eye of the storm was scary. She knew why Otan wanted to curl up and sleep on the gentle dirt and never leave.

This stillness, however deceptive, had warmth and and food. It had endless tech to take apart and study, tech that showed how people used to live, tech that carried information and functionality and security. It had John and their movements, just a little slower. John and their love, just a little quieter here. John and his heartbeat and his creativity and the shadows in his face.

It had the gentle lie of time, because, watching him study the cookbook, she knew, doubtlessly, that she could stay here forever.

It terrified her.

* * *

Before going to bed that night, and after some obligatory interaction with the others at the lab, they both looked out the window in the room they’d claimed.

There was a light on by the patio, and it cast a pale, ghostly kind of mist on the treetops. It suddenly hurt Emori to the bone to think those trees, all trees, might be destroyed by what’s coming. Trees had always been kind to her.

“It’s quiet,” she said. His arm tightened around her.

“Not for long,” he said, and she knew, in his way, he depended on the reemergence of chaos.  

“Not for long,” she agreed. She felt the heaviness of sleep settle on her and allowed it, resting her head against him. Tomorrow she’d observe and move and give the panic its place. The fear had always treated her well too, letting her know when to run and when to strike.

But now, standing with John at the dark window, with the night holding its breath, they were still.

 _Not for long_ , she thought. _But for now_.

**Author's Note:**

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> 'Gafen bis' means 'horny animal'.
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> The first song they dance to is "volatile times" by IAMX. The second is "Movement" by Hozier. :)


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